If a big company like Boeing, Microsoft or Apple were to announce: “We refuse to hire black applicants,” such a thing would be instantly blasted; it would go viral in the blink of an eye and the legal system would be right on it.
But at the lowest levels of employment - such as, let’s say, a mother deciding what kind of babysitters she will hire or would not hire to watch over her toddler - would the law still come down on her for saying “I won’t hire Hispanics” or something of the sort? Or, even if she kept her mouth shut but still practiced the discrimination in silence, would anyone have grounds to complain (since, technically, you have the right to hire who you want to hire and nobody can demand to be your babysitter, or to mow your lawn, etc.?)
Organizations with less than 15 employees are not subject to EEOC requirement.
So your family isn’t required to follow anti discrimination regulations, unless you have 15 or more employees that work for you.
And even if you did have more than 15 employees, and the babysitter or lawn maintenance worker was a contractor and not being hired as an employee, you would not be required to follow EEOC as it relates to contractors.
State law may have additional requirements. For example Massachusetts discrimination laws apply to enterprises employing six or more employees.
But pretty much in every state there isn’t an actionable complaint if you are DIRECTLY hiring a nanny or elder care working and discriminating on multiple dimensions.
But if you are using an agency or even a website to find the nanny or caregiver, that operator would need to be careful about what they use to screen and match employers and workers.
Just as a point of note, ‘hiring’ a part-time babysitter, house cleaner, elder care, et cetera by a private individual is typically a contract relationship that is classified as “intermittent employment” and is not governed by EEOC regulations, even those that still apply to small businesses and nonpermanent contract employment. Someone can still sue for violations of civil rights or clearly prejudicial action that harms their employability or has some material cost, but there isn’t any legal mechanism to force contractual relationships of that nature to conform to any kind of equal opportunity standard.
Yep. Okay, let us say you actually posted "We refuse to hire black applicants,” you could certainly be sued.
However, if you are a small employer, and someone noticed that you have never hired a black, then that isnt covered under EEOC. So, yeah, a small employer can be discriminatory, but if blatant they could be sued.
Well, I suppose you could sue for some theoretical damages in not being considered for employment, although if this is for a single, itermittant contract position establishing any real lost value is basically impossible. I don’t know what real basis you could sue for a civil rights violation but you could probably make some kind of case out of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 or some state-level laws.
Even for a larger (large enough for the law to apply) employer, never having hired a black person might not necessarily mean anything. There are places in the US where blacks are less than 1% of the population; in such a place it’d be unsurprising if a business didn’t have any black employees out of 15.
The EEOC uses the four-fifths rule. If the selection rate for a given group is less than 80% of the selection rate for the group with the highest rate than they take that as evidence of adverse impact in hiring practices.
Right, selection rate, where the denominator is the number of people from that demographic who applied for a job. But in cases where that denominator is very low or zero, the actual number hired might be very low or zero.
(and presumably they have rules for cases where a very small but nonzero number of some demographic applies)
I only brought it up to bolster you’re statement that if you have a group that only makes up 1% of your hiring pool then it’s rather easy not to have hired any of them. i.e. Just seeing that there are no members of a particular demographic is not necessarily indicative of adverse impact in hiring practices.
There was also a King of the Hill episode where Hank learns that he can’t fire a drug-addicted employee without violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. His solution: resign from his own company to bring the total number of employees down to 14, so the ADA doesn’t apply - then have another employee rehire him after firing the addict. (In real life, the ADA applies to employers with 15 or more employees for each working day in each of 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year, presumably to avoid that exact scenario.)
National Lampoon in the 70’s printed a response (not sure of it was real?) from the North Dakota National Guard to a Washington bureaucrat inquiry why they were not meeting their affirmative action quota. They pointed out that of the 1% to 2% black residents of the state, the majority were either enlisted men working on the local Air Force base and ineligible, or college students attending from out of state - and most college students during the Vietnam war were somewhat hostile to the idea of joining the military, the rest would likely be on ROTC.
